Cyborg Slow Boring
How I use AI plus the pedestrianizing DC and the case for overpriced chicken parts
Merry Christmas to all and to all a good mailbag!
I have to say that most of you sickos did a very poor job of following Halina’s instructions to ask non-political questions. But I did my best to find the least-political of the bunch to maintain at least a little holiday spirit.
My personal tradition for the week between Christmas and New Year’s is to rewatch Whit Stillman’s masterful debut film, Metropolitan. The non-naturalistic dialogue and the somewhat off-kilter performances from some of the actors are definitely not to everyone’s taste, but I love it.
DJ: Does Matt know any Dalton alums who had Epstein as a teacher?
No, he was way before my time and also didn’t teach there for very long.
Zachary: What is the biggest development/story(non political) in the world that you think people aren’t paying enough attention to?
I think most people do not appreciate how powerful the current leading-edge AI models really are or how rapidly they are improving. Everyone knows this is a big story, but it’s actually a bigger story than they know.
Nathaniel Rubin: A few weeks back, Halina posted a look inside the Slow Boring research/writing/production process. It seemed to use very little in the way of AI. But Matt’s pretty bullish on the technology, so I’m curious: how does the Slow Boring team use AI (Claude Code, regular Claude, Gemini, etc.) day-to-day?
The main way that AI has impacted Slow Boring so far is having LLMs in their research mode do literature reviews on different subjects. This used to be something that I would have done by a human, and the LLM work product is in some ways better and in some important ways worse than what a human does, but it’s dramatically faster and cheaper. The real value there, in turn, isn’t so much that I save time and money on literature reviews but that I can order up many more of them and with much less advance planning.
It’s now less a component in what’s an already planned-out process for writing a column, and more just a way of noodling around, learning things, and exploring hypotheses.
Another thing that I’ve found Claude useful for is building out analogies that I’m considering writing.
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